Tuesday, July 11, 2017

2 Crazy Days

On Monday, we began our first day of classes. And let me tell you, I've already had a lot of fun.

We started class at about 9 AM, where we met our teacher, Jason Brasel. He asked us to call him Jason, and told us a little about himself. He is a great guy, and a really good teacher. We started out that first day with a name game, but then moved into some math. The first set of problems (which took us up to lunch) dealt with base-8 arithmetic. This means there is a 1s place, 8s place, 64s place, etc. instead of a 1s place, 10s place, 100s place, etc. Those were fun to work on, because it's something new, challenging, and most of us hadn't seen anything like it before.
A large group of VSA students, all wearing their VSA shirts
Lunch passed, and I sat/talked with a group that consisted of a guy from my proctor group (Keaston) and a girl from my class (Carmen) as well as their friends. They've been doing the program for a while, so they know each other pretty well.

After lunch, we went back into the classroom for more of class and study hall. We wrapped up the base-8 stuff and went on to card shuffling, like how many perfect shuffles it takes to get a deck of cards to it's original state. We went by twos, starting with four cards, and went all the way up to 64. Jason says there's some sort of pattern with it, but none of us have been able to tell what it is yet. I love having to figure out this type of problem! It's a mystery for now, but I think we're getting close. 

Finding student athletes for the Scavenger
hunt! (center is Keaston)
After the main class, we had our Areté classes. I got horror movie makeup, which means I got two black eyes (makeup ones, of course). Dinner was after the Areté class, and I sat with the same group again.

After dinner came the campus-wide photo scavenger hunt. That was a lot of fun, and I got some great pictures.

The next day, we started class at 9 AM again, after breakfast. Jason let us wrap up the card shuffling table, and we moved to modular arithmetic for the remainder of the morning. These problems are also really cool, because if you have problems that are mod-10, then 3 x 4 = 2. How? Because If you divide 12 (the product of 3 x 4) by 10 (which the modular part) then you get a remainder of 2. sSuper cool, if you ask me. In the afternoon, we started tying all of what we've learned so far into cryptography, and worked with a cipher a little bit. It's been a really fun couple of days in the Mathematics of Cryptography class, and I can't wait for more.
The massive piece of graph paper Julia created to work on the card shuffling problem
That night (tonight) we signed up for different activities to do after dinner. I chose the Mario Kart Tournament, and Joceline did it with me. We were on the same team, and unforunately we didn't win. Maybe next time. After that, we had some free time and wrapped up the night. 

It's only been a few days, but I've had a lot of fun so far.

2 comments:

  1. Enjoying reading your blog posts, Evan! Sounds like a fantastic class!

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  2. As I understand it, cryptography has to do with code breaking. I'd like to learn how these card shuffling assignments lead to code breaking. What made you choose monster make up for your arête class? Is that the arête you'll be going to regularly?

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